Pellerin: Let's rid ourselves of this grass-on-median madness

It’s finally here. After six months of living like mushrooms we are, at last, able to go outside half naked. Woohoo.

The tulip festival has come and gone. There are leaves growing on trees. Soon the air will smell like lilac and we’ll whine about that blasted humidex. Any day now, mosquitoes will come for a visit and refuse to leave. And the grass will need cutting. Cue sighing.

Why, though? I mean, why do we have so much grass everywhere?

Sure, if a lawn is what you like around your house, by all means have one. Golf courses and public parks are great places for it, too. Anywhere people might walk around barefoot, sit and dream or share a sandwich with the ants.

But why have it on medians, along the side of the road, places where nobody in their right mind would deliberately spend any time? Why do we insist on having something that costs more to maintain than we have budgets for? And whose mowing requires machines that spew toxic emissions to boot?

You’re familiar with the scene: grass grows to the point where streets look unkempt. Then we have weeds all over, and the city looks desolate especially after a few hot dry days when it all turns brownish yellow.

Yes, of course we want greenery everywhere, and not just because it looks pretty. The right kind of vegetation can help us fight the heat island effect, contribute to filtering rain water and enrich the soil. It also provides a tiny ecosystem that benefits birds, bees, and those adorable little rodents. But if you think grass is the only green thing on offer, you lack imagination.

The City of Montreal last week announced it would finance a research project along Boulevard Laurentien in Ahuntsic-Cartierville (north of downtown, across the river from Laval) to find alternatives to grass. The research project is to last two years and cost $300,000. At the end of the process, in March 2021, Montreal hopes to have a protocol that can be replicated elsewhere on the island.

Why so long? Because finding the proper replacement requires a lot of observation over more than just one season. What happens to ground covering when it’s frozen, covered in snow, hailed on, sprinkled with salt and whatnot matters a great deal, especially as we hope to see it grow back to healthy green in the spring.

On top of winter, the plants need to survive busy urban environments, with noise and pollution but also foot and bike traffic. We need ourselves some pretty hardy stuff. Researchers aren’t sharing details of what ideas they’re considering just yet, but one possibility I like is that of the “tapestry lawn” concept — a combination of climate-appropriate, highly-tolerant ground-level plants — developed in the U.K. It looks great, and barely needs any upkeep.

Whatever experts eventually settle on will have to do a better job of keeping allergens down than grass does. Don’t know if you’ve looked outside at all this week, but everything is covered in yellow flowers. No, not covered. Saturated. I drove on Hunt Club from the 417 to the Airport Parkway the other day, and all you could see on both sides of the road (and the middle) was yellow carpets of dandelions stretching from here to there and back again.

No, we’re not using pesticides to get rid of them, because it’s 2019 and we’ve evolved past that. But the downside of this progress is that millions upon millions of yellow flowers all over the city will soon be replaced with an equal number of little white puffs of misery. How do you spell achoo, again?

The City of Ottawa is not, as far as I know, working on finding alternatives to grass. So let me plant (geddit) the thought. We don’t need to rip everything up right away. But maybe next time we do remove grass from a median for necessary road work or build a new patch of something, we could think of other vegetation instead of boring old time-consuming, expensive-to-maintain grass. Montreal is showing us the way. I’m not usually in favour of plagiarism, but maybe this time I’ll make an exception.

Brigitte Pellerin is an Ottawa writer keen on making a great city greater.

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